Were you there when they crucified my Lord?Were you there when they crucified my Lord?Oh, sometimes, it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble—Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

—Traditional Spiritual

This is the fourth in a series of articles being presented by the LaRouche PAC National Policy Committee, in collaboration with Lyndon LaRouche, as part of his campaign to create a new Presidency over the coming 100 days.

Aug. 22—In November 2000, just days before the ill-fated U.S. Presidential Election (ill-fated because, like today, there was no possible “winning outcome”), Lyndon LaRouche wrote an extraordinary and prescient paper entitled, “Politics as Art,” which concludes

. . .there is a precious lesson to be learned by all citizens and other residents of the United States, especially those oppressed by the ruinous policy-trends of the past thirty-five years, from, among relevant other sources, the polished form of what is called the Negro Spiritual.

Sixteen years later, I believe that this is more urgently true than at the time LaRouche wrote that earlier paper, which is why I have recently dedicated myself to the mission of engaging members of the Schiller Institute New York City Chorus in learning several African-American Spirituals as part of the upcoming 9-11 Memorial Series of performances of the Mozart Requiem.

U.S. Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, escort captured enemy prisoners of war in Iraq.

Review what has happened since that dreadful November 2000 non-election and reflect on Mr. LaRouche’s forecasts every step of the way. His forecast a few days before the election was that no one would actually win. That seemed unimaginable at the time. How could you have a Presidential election in which there was no declared winner?

However, that was exactly what happened, and weeks of hanging chads later, George W. Bush was declared the winner. When “W” began searching for his Attorney General, and the name John Ashcroft was floated, Lyndon LaRouche warned, in a Jan. 3, 2001 international address, that this regime would only be able to govern through “Nazi tactics” and “crisis management” following a “Reichstag Fire event.” Just nine months later, on Sept. 11, 2001, four planes were hijacked from the Newark (N.J.), Logan (Boston) and Dulles (Virginia) airports and flown into the World Trade Towers in Manhattan and the Pentagon, and one crashed in Shanksville, Penn. All the passengers and hijackers were incinerated. Thousands more were killed in the buildings which were struck.

Rather than launch a full investigation into the role of Saudi Arabia, which was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers, and into Saudi-British deals like the Prince Bandar/Margaret Thatcher “Al-Yamamah” oil for weapons deal, which had created a giant slush fund capable of financing such an attack, Vice President Dick Cheney blocked all references to the Saudis, and instead sought to focus on Iraq. This included using disinformation extracted through torture to induce then-Defense Secretary Colin Powell to lie about an Iraq connection to Al-Qaeda in a subsequent speech given at the UN.

By March of 2003, with substantial prodding and complicity from the now-thoroughly-discredited and incriminated former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a full invasion of Iraq was begun. On April 3, 2003, Lyndon LaRouche was interviewed on BBCabout his opposition to the Iraq war and he identified explicitly the role of Vice President Dick Cheney, who moved after Sept. 11, 2001 to get his 1991 war plan back on track.

Also in 2003, on July 17, former UN weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly turned up dead after publicly accusing Tony Blair of “sexing up” (i.e. fabricating claims in) documents purporting to prove that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Kelly’s death was officially declared a suicide, but a team of medical doctors and others have subsequently expressed serious doubts that he could have died in the manner claimed by members of the Tony Blair Government. Their opinion is that he was most likely murdered.

As of June, 2016, nearly 4,500 Americans had been killed in Iraq. The suicide rate of Veterans in the United States is now over 8,000 per year. The suicide rates in the general population have increased significantly, as have rates of death by heroin overdose and alcoholism. This horrific increase in the death rates among Americans under the age of 55, at a time when they should be in the prime of life, is not a “natural” trend of human population growth. This increase in the death rate has occurred for two reasons. One, the satanically evil policies of the Bush and Obama Administrations, as both presidents have been tools of the British Monarchy, enforced by Wall Street and the FBI; and two, up until now, the American people have capitulated to Wall Street- and Hollywood-funded-and-orchestrated public opinion as it oozes out of their “smart” phones through their wide-open eyes and ears to poison their minds.

creative commons/BasicGov

Foreclosures devastated American communities. Millions were thrown out of their homes after the 2007-2008 banking crash.

LaRouche PAC organizers’ poster calling for a halt to foreclosures and for reorganizing the banking system under Glass-Steagall.

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

King Salman bids farewell to President Obama at his motorcade at Erga Palace.

Take the 2008 TARP. Remember that? In July of 2007, Lyndon LaRouche warned that the entire trans-Atlantic system was completely bankrupt and nothing could be done save it, and put forward the “Homeowners and Bank Protection Act” to halt foreclosures and reorganize the banking system under Glass-Steagall standards. Even though the truth came out that thousands of bankers and mortgage brokers had been engaged in outright theft and fraud, no major banker was jailed. Instead the very institutions and individuals who created the mess, received billions upon billions of dollars of bailouts and bonuses, creating unbearable inflationary expenses for the average American, as millions were expelled from their homes. Did Americans object?

No. They decided to go along with then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (who has just endorsed Hillary Clinton for President) when he threatened the Congress that there would be troops in the streets if Wall Street didn’t get this money, and the first $700 billion simply had to be issued, and then the next one and the next one. . .

The American people gave Cheney and Bush their permission to torture prisoners in their name at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. They went along with Obama’s bombing of Libya for 250 days, which the Congress never authorized; they accepted Susan Rice’s lies about the “ video” that caused the deaths of four American officials in Benghazi; and they went along with the ludicrous idea that we could have a health care system run by the IRS which would be “affordable.” If it appeared on Facebook that the far side of the moon might be made of green cheese, your neighbors would probably believe that as well. At least, in this case, the Chinese are actually going to investigate the truth of the matter, so interested Americans will have the benefit of knowing the truth.

If this were not absurdly tragic enough, now there is a new virtual reality fad, called “Pokemon Go,” where supposedly adult humans are chasing non-existent creatures which pop up on their i-phones and GPS devices. These Pokemon players seem to be unable or unwilling to distinguish reality from fantasy. They seem to be so far gone, that Bertrand Russell is celebrating from the grave that it has now been determined how much it costs, per person, to make people believe, or at least profess to believe, “that snow is black.” (Russell, Impact of Science on Society)

It was exactly this mini-Dark Age which LaRouche foresaw when he wrote in the aforementioned paper:

Tomorrow, U.S. election-day, November 7, 2000, we shall witness an awful real-life tragedy on the world stage, the threat, if not yet the actuality of a new dark age. That threat is today’s outgrowth of a long-standing, widespread violation of those Classical principles of statecraft which every citizen should have been given the right to know. . .

If the United States of America and Western Europe represented the planet as a whole, then the situation would be nearly hopeless. Happily, the United States is no longer the center of a unipolar world. There is a new leadership on the planet which represents about 70-plus nations and two thirds of the world’s people. This leadership is embodied in Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China.

Unlike the European Central Bank and the U.S. Federal Reserve with their helicopter money and negative interest rates, the Chinese have embarked on a program called “One Belt and One Road,” which puts an end to geopolitics and “balance of power” infantilism, and replaces it with what President Xi calls “win-win cooperation.” Over 25 years, 500 million Chinese people were lifted up out of poverty, and tens of millions are now learning to play musical instruments. China has just launched an ambitious program to attain levels of scientific literacy throughout the population as a whole. China is reaching out to nations in Africa and South America to help finance and build great projects, including ports, railroads and canals which will transform the global trade routes planet-wide.

Enlarging Gwadar deep-water port in Pakistan (seen here) is part of President Xi’s blueprint for China’s role in Eurasian economic development.

Particularly since August of last year, when President Putin visited China for the spectacular V-J Day parade, these two heads of state have been running circles around the western leaders, including emphatically an increasingly desperate President Barack Obama, who, thanks to his own gigantic ego, still hasn’t realized how badly he’s been defeated.

It was Putin’s announcement at last year’s UN General Assembly that he was forming a coalition against terror, starting with defeating ISIS in Syria, which created the anvil, against which LaRouche organizers could hammer Obama’s protection of the Saudi and British apparatus which ran the 9-11 attacks 15 years ago. Under these conditions, Obama could no longer avoid the release of the famous “28 pages” of the 9-11 Joint Congressional Inquiry which, despite lying U.S.-based media reports, are completely devastating to the Saudi Royal Family, as well as the FBI and CIA which covered up for them on behalf of the Bush Administration and the British Empire.

The actions of Xi Jinping and Putin have created the conditions for a radical change for the better within the United States, even though most Americans are oblivious to this potential. Partly, Americans are oblivious because of their own participation in the corruption of the nation. The corruption has found fertile ground in minds and souls which have been deprived of beauty.

EIRNS/Alicia Cerritani

Rep.Walter Jones at a press conference to urge release of the 28 pages of the 9/11 report suppressed by Vice President Dick Cheney and President Obama. Joining him, left to right, members of the 9/11 families: Ellen Saracini; Terry, Justin, and Kaitlin Strada; and Abraham Scott.

As depraved as Americans have become, we are now presented with the opportunity to reverse the insanity of the last 50 years and chart a new course toward a bright future, thanks to the collaboration of Putin and Xi and the tireless commitment of Lyndon LaRouche over decades. With the release of the 28 pages, justice is near in the 9-11 case, and Glass-Steagall is a plank in both major party platforms. But to claim the victory, Americans have to remember what it is to be human—that is that human beings are not animals. That we are creative, and that that creativity is fueled by a love of our fellow man, and a love of mankind and posterity.

It was not the atrocity committed on Sept. 11, 2001 that nearly destroyed our Republic, but rather, it has been our own inaction in the face of a great evil which claimed the lives of thousands of our own citizens, not to mention millions of others,— which has almost rendered us unsalvageable.

This is why the African-American Spirituals, in their Classical form, as developed by the collaborators of Dvorak, are so important to our survival. Whenever she came to a choir rehearsal that I was directing, Sylvia Olden Lee used to say to the members of the chorus (in this case a largely African-American chorus in Washington, D.C.), “remember your Aunt Hattie.” And she would clutch her hands together into her stomach and bow her head as if remembering some distant painful sacrifice, made by those who came before.

What she, Robert McFerrin, and Bill Warfield, all of whom I had the pleasure of observing both in performance and as teachers, conveyed very clearly, was that these songs are not slave songs. These are songs of noble human beings, unjustly held in bondage, who are expressing their dignity and their confidence in their own immortality. As Dr. Eugene T. Simpson, who was a trusted collaborator of Hall Johnson, writes in his book The Hall Johnson Concert Spirituals, “Perhaps the most important thing to remember in interpreting the spirituals is that they are not songs of defeat, but songs of survival.” I would go farther to say that they are songs of triumph of justice against evil, and of the victory of the human spirit.

Diane Sare, director of the Schiller Institute choruses in the New York City area, working with members of the Manhattan Schiller Institute Chorus.

As we organize the people of Manhattan and the surrounding areas to participate in the Schiller Institute Chorus, or to sign the LaRouche PAC petition to get justice for the victims of 9-11 by ensuring that such a thing never happens again, we are discovering a population that has not been able to reconcile their emotions about what occurred on that horrible day, and the fact that nothing has ever been done about it.

For example, those who lost a spouse say, “I just can’t bear to think about it any longer. I spent too many years obsessing about it. It ruined my life.” Or, “My husband was a survivor, but all of his co-workers were killed. He was never the same, and our marriage ended as a result.” Or a teacher who stated that she knew over 30 students in her school who had a parent who was killed. A police officer we met recently has just been diagnosed with a rare form of terminal cancer as a result of his work near Ground Zero. The list goes on and on. A handful of exceptional family members of the victims have had the fortitude to keep fighting for justice, even though to do so keeps the pain of loss very near the surface.

The African slaves and their descendants who created and sang the Spirituals under conditions of horrific physical deprivation, torture, and captivity succeeded in keeping their dignity and immortality as human beings with a direct relationship to God.

Mastery of these songs, in their polished form, as developed by Hall Johnson, H.T. Burleigh and others, is one pathway for Americans to access their own humanity. Once this spark has been reignited, as we saw in Selma, 1965, and Berlin, 1989, the people will no longer accommodate injustice. We are almost there.

Were you there when they rolled the stone away?Were you there when they rolled the stone away?Oh, sometimes, it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble—You were there when they rolled the stone away.

Thank you for supporting the Schiller Institute. Your contributions enable us to publish, sponsor conferences, and support other activities which are critical interventions into the policy making and cultural life of the nation and the world.